A refrigerator is an electric home appliance that is used to store food in a refrigerated state or in a frozen state.
In recent years, the capacity of the refrigerator has been greatly increased, and a home bar, an ice maker, a shelf, or a door box has been mounted on the rear of a door of the refrigerator. In this type of refrigerator, when the door of the refrigerator is closed, the component mounted on the rear of the door of the refrigerator may interfere with a shelf or a drawer mounted in a storage compartment of a main body of the refrigerator.
In order to prevent such interference, the front end of a drawer (e.g. a shelf or a drawer) mounted in the storage compartment of the main body of the refrigerator (e.g. a refrigerating compartment or a freezing compartment) is located at a place spaced apart from the front of the main body of the refrigerator by a predetermined distance.
For this reason, a user must put his/her hand into the storage compartment deeply in order to take out food stored in the drawer. Furthermore, it is difficult for the user to check the food stored in the rear portion of the storage compartment. These problems become more critical as the size of the refrigerator is increased.
Various methods have been proposed to solve the above problems. For example, Korean Patent Application Publication No. 2010-0130357 (hereinafter, referred to as '357 patent) discloses a refrigerator configured to have a structure in which a shelf or a drawer mounted in a refrigerating compartment or a freezing compartment is disposed at a receiving frame, the front end of an articulated link is connected to the bottom surface of a refrigerator door, and the rear end of the articulated link is connected to the receiving frame. When the refrigerator door is turned and opened, therefore, the receiving frame is moved forward, with the result that the shelf or the drawer is moved forward.
The conventional refrigerator is configured to have a structure in which the rotational motion of the door is converted into the rectilinear motion of the receiving frame via a link. In this structure, only the forward moving component of the force applied to the receiving frame via the link contributes to the movement of the receiving frame. In '357 patent, the rear end of the link, which is connected to the receiving frame, and the front end of the link, which is connected to the door, are close to each other when the refrigerator is viewed from the front. In order to increase the forward moving component of the force applied to the receiving frame and to increase the displacement of the receiving frame with respect to the rotational angle of the door, therefore, it is necessary to provide an articulated link, with the result that the structure is complicated and manufacturing cost is increased.